The Axios founders on how AI ruined your inbox, why the '90s really were different and how to succeed through 'Simplify'

Three years after Smart Brevity became a corporate mantra, Axios’s founders are back with a rebuttal to the thing they think broke it: artificial intelligence. Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz are promoting Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less, and the argument is blunt. AI was sold as a shortcut. So far, they say, it has mostly produced more decks, longer emails and a lot of motion that doesn’t move anything forward.

That diagnosis comes with a practical complaint. Inside companies, VandeHei said, people who never used to build presentations are now generating material that has to be checked line by line. Allen says the squeeze is coming from both sides: more internal work, more external pitches, more words everywhere. He keeps coming back to the same enemy, which is “work-like activity” — the kind of busywork that feels productive while quietly swallowing the day.

Their answer is not a grand theory. It’s an audit. Not once a year, not even just quarterly, but as often as needed. VandeHei says he used to run the exercise every three months and is now trying it monthly, with a weekly cadence not sounding crazy in the conversation. The questions are plain: what has to happen, what can stop, what can be automated? That’s the whole game, they argue, and companies that don’t do it will keep drowning in their own process.

The personal side of the book is just as stripped down. Allen says the most useful words he’s learned are “I’m booked,” followed by a simple rule: if the answer to an invitation is basically “eh, I probably should,” that’s a no. Schwartz says the deeper lesson is permission — writing down goals so guilt stops running the show. He ties that to his own dyslexia and to the way teams inside companies get stuck because nobody has formally said they can drop the dead weight.

The broader point is familiar but still annoying: modern life is full of inputs, and AI is adding more before it adds less. VandeHei and Allen say the 1990s were slower because there were fewer alerts, fewer bells, fewer ways to be interrupted. That doesn’t make the past magical. It just makes the present look overstuffed. Their pitch is basically to stop confusing noise for progress before the inbox wins entirely.